My group only just played Sea of Blood for the first time, and we ran into a few things that we wondered how other people coped with.

1) Outdoor Island Encounters.

Okay, the first level of an island encounter uses the island map and the layout from the rulebook. Next two are regular dungeon levels. Seems simple enough. But....

a) That's a pretty big island! There are very few places where the overlord would be able to summon monsters, as the heroes practically have the entire island covered for line of site. (unless there's a max range for line of sight that we are missing....) So where the heck does one summon monsters?

We came up with two possible solutions. One is treat it like the outdoor encounters from RtL, where monsters were summoned and placed off the map, and moved on to it on their next turn. The other solution we had, which the heroes liked, was since there is the Dungeon entrance somewhere on the island, have summoned monsters placed on there, and then they can be moved onto the island on the next turn. Which kind of makes it like the monsters realize the island is under attack so they are coming from the dungeon to defend..

Anyone have any other ideas?

b) Heroes start on the ship. The rules didn't really clarify this, but do they need to sail the ship right up to the island and then jump off onto the land? Or does the ship stay where it is, and they jump into the water and swim to the island? The heroes chose to swim (too bad no daggertooth sharks are in the water for the island levels)

2) We haven't done any sea encounters yet, but I just wanted to clarify on ship movement. My understanding is that once a hero 'activates' the helm location, he can move the ship forward.. Okay.. easy enough.. Also depending on the currents, the ship may move from side to side.. okay.. also easy enough. Is there any way to rotate the ship 90 degrees? Or in these sea encounters are the ships locked into the direction they were originally heading for the duration of the battle? I only read through the sea rules once, so maybe I missed something there..

thanks.

I do not have Sea of Blood, but from reading the rules, trees still block line of sight. You can always spawn behind the trees if the heroes don't spread out too much. I do like your idea of 'reinforcement', but I don't belive there is any rules to point toward this, as large monsters wouldn't be able to fit through the small one space entrance tile.

On the boat movment, no. You may not rotate the boats, you must choose your movments and steering carefully to achieve the most desired effect for your side(Hero or Overlord).

On page 21 it explains that the ship is anchored as shown on the setup map, with the sails lowered. The heroes can unanchor and try to sail in closer, or just jump off into the water.

Don't forget about all the trees, those block LOS, and also many island maps have blocks and other LOS blockers so spawning won't be that difficult (unless one of your heroes is Kel).

Also don't forget that almost the whole island is covered by Scrub, a new terrain feature that adds an extra distance when tracing LOS (so magic/ranged attacks have to shoot further than normal through scrubs). Doesn't affect spawning, but will have a factor on your ranged characters.

-shnar

Scrub only says it affects ranged attacks. It specifies that it doesn't affect melee, but there's nothing (except inference) to indicate that it also affects magic attacks.

James McMurray said:

Scrub says:

When making a ranged attack into or through a scrub space, every scrub space that line of sight is traced through adds two range to the total distance instead of one. Melee attacks are not affected by scrub.

Note the use of the lower case range. The rules use R anged (upper case) when referencing Ranged attacks and r ange (lower case) when referencing distance/range. So for scrub, it effects all distance attacks, therefore both Ranged and Magic.

Hrm, it does though say "when making a ranged attack". Usually "ranged attack" does mean the Ranged ability...

Add this to the list of unanswered questions!

-shnar

shnar said:

or use the ropes on the ship to swing into the shallow water area